Monday, January 21, 2013

Day 5–Kingston to Home

We left on time Saturday morning, deciding to take the long way home through New York, just for something different. Our trip started with taking the ferry to Wolfe Island, crossing Wolfe Island and catching the ferry on the others side to New York. This was a little bit of a different border crossing then we were used to. The ferry from Wolfe Island to Cape Vincent, New York was a small ferry. I think it held 11 vehicles and you paid to cross. The interesting part was that when you got to the other side the ferry became the waiting line to cross the border. There was no room to get off the ferry, so you waited your turn on the ferry … not sure how well the ferry manages to keep on schedule that way, but it must work

We started off taking the scenic route and stopped for lunch in a small town. After that we decided to need to make up time if we were going to get home on time. So we hopped on the highway. After a late afternoon snack we found ourselves in Niagara Falls, New York around supper time. We weren’t hungry so we decided to enjoy some of the scenery before having supper and heading home and stopped to spend some time at Niagara Falls State Park.

Having only ever seen the Canadian side Niagara Falls it was nice to take a glimpse from the other side. Now I must say that as far as seeing the actual waterfalls the view is much better from the Canadian side. From the US side you stand behind the falls but don’t get to actually see what the falls look like. But since we’ve seen the other side of the falls often enough we actually found we really liked this side. We liked the is was more like a park. On the Canadian side it’s all cement and buildings …. total toursim, nothing natural. Now of course the States side is total tourism too …. but it’s more natural, it’s a park where you walk the paths and enjoy nature. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have a huge amount of time, this meant we tried to take in as much as possible in a short time … it also meant it was very hard on my sprained ankle and I paid for it later.

We took the Pedestrian Bridge to Goat Island and made our way around there.

This picture is taken from Terrapin Point. From here we spent some time watching tightrope walker Jay Cochrane. This is as good of a pictures as I could get since ….

this is how far away he was from us. He was walking across on the Canadian side of the falls between the Skylon Tower and The Hilton Fairsview Hotel, he did this daily throughout the summer.

We did manage to get ourselves all the way over to the the Three Sisters Islands, which was a really nice area. We really couldn’t believe how open it was and easy to access the water throughout the park.

By this time it was getting late and there was no way my foot could get me back to the parking lot. So we caught one of the last “trains” (wheeled train) back to the parking lot.

Matthew quite enjoyed this open concept train ride

We were now getting hungry but wanted to get across the border before we ate. This proved a bit more difficult then expected. While we were parked right by the border and could watch the border crossing from the parking lot, getting into the line to cross the border caused to be rather confusing as roads from all directions seem to just merge in … it’s a bit of a budding system it would appear … don’t ask me how the guy at the back ever gets anywhere. Having no patience for line ups Rob decided to carry on and cross over at the Lewiston Bridge. This proved to take some figuring out to get on the right road but we eventually made it over the bridge … altho after a bit of a wait in which time we polished off the leftover snacks in the cooler and decided we didn’t really need to stop for supper afterall. We ended up stopping for a bathroom break and a quick snack and then headed home . By that time it was near 11pm and the next day was Sunday but the nice thing about this type of holiday is how quickly you can unpack and clean up … especially if you separate the to-be-washed stuff and the clean stuff when you’re packing up,